BEN BRADLEE, the hard-driving editor who reigned over the Washington Post with the style of a well-dressed swashbuckler and the profane vocabulary of a dockworker as the newspaper helped topple President Richard Nixon, died Tuesday aged 93.

    Bradlee’s death at his Washington home of natural causes was announced by the Post, which reported late last month that he had begun hospice care after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for several years.

    As executive editor from 1968 until 1991, Bradlee became one of the most important figures in Washington, as well as part of journalism history, while transforming the Post from a staid morning daily into one of the most dynamic and respected publications in the United States.

    Bradlee’s work guiding young reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they traced a 1972 burglary at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office and apartment complex back to the Nixon White House has been celebrated from journalism schools to Hollywood.

    The Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Watergate scandal, which forced Nixon to quit under threat of impeachment in August 1974.

    Bradlee gave Woodward and Bernstein license to pursue the scandal and its cover-up vigorously, approving their use of the unidentified “Deep Throat” source, and the newspaper published about 400 articles about Watergate over 28 months.

    The Post’s coverage — along with the book and movie about it, “All the President’s Men” — inspired a generation of investigative reporters.

    In 1972, the Post joined the New York Times in publishing stories based on the Pentagon Papers, a secret government account of Vietnam War decisions, despite heavy legal pressure. The Post also uncovered details of the Iran-Contra scandal that rocked Ronald Reagan’s White House.

    “I think this shows the (adversarial free-press) system works,” Bradlee said. “It’s a wonderful control on governments that are not all that careful on policing themselves.”

    Bradlee was also a fixture on the Washington social circuit with his third wife, former Post reporter Sally Quinn, who was 20 years younger.

    He was born in Boston on Aug. 26, 1921, to an aristocratic family. He attended Harvard and served on a Navy destroyer in the Pacific during World War II before starting a New Hampshire newspaper in 1946.

    His career at the Washington Post began in 1948 as a police reporter. (SD-Agencies)